The year is 1935, five years into the Great Depression the tiny Great Plains' Township of Johnson Mesa prepares to commemorate 52 years as a homestead. Strange things begin to occur in this section when a traveling salesman arrives offering a miracle soil additive. He pledges that given one month of his treatment, the most barren of their fields will yield results. Over the course of the month of March objects spring eerily to life; yet a young woman stumbles upon a dark secret about the visitor. On the second Sunday of April, a mysterious blizzard of dust descends upon the town, turning a sunny afternoon into a horrible blackness that's darker than the darkest night and the salesman is now faced with the past he thought he had outrun.
- The Sunken Forest
After a month of studying Robert Mckee's Story I feel comfortable releasing the plot to my Group Project Animated Short Feature. I encourage anyone who's thinking about making a film to read Mckee's book, its a must.
Robert McKee is a world-renowned lecturer in screenwriting, best known for the four day Story Seminar he developed whilst a professor at the University of Southern California. His former students include 63 Academy Award winners and 164 Emmy winners; the likes of Kirk Douglas, John Cleese and Peter Jackson, director of Lord of the Rings, have attended his seminar. His services have been employed by 20th Century Fox, Disney, Nickelodeon, Paramount…
McKee lays out the principles of how to achieve this – it’s not about writing by numbers or to a formula, it’s about developing your craft, showing you how to do it in the most effective way. We’re all surrounded by story – movies, novels, TV, theatre, the news, gossip, our own lives – and are hard-wired to expect it to evolve and deliver in a reasonably predictable format: think how you feel about a disappointing ending, a story where nothing happens for ages in the middle or even a high-profile crime that remains unsolved.
Anyway, you get the picture. He’s good.